单选题 Information technology that helps doctors and patients make decisions has been around for a long time. Crude online tools like WebMD get millions of visitors a day. But Watson is a different beast. According to IBM, it can digest information and make recommendations much more quickly, and more intelligently, than perhaps any machine before it—processing up to 60 million pages of text per second, even when that text is in the form of plain old prose, or what scientists call "natural language."
That"s no small thing, because something like 80 percent of all information is "unstructured." In medicine, it consists of physician notes dictated into medical records, long-winded sentences published in academic journals, and raw numbers stored online by public-health departments. At least in theory, Watson can make sense of it all. It can sit in on patient examinations, silently listening. And over time, it can learn and get better at figuring out medical problems and ways of treating them the more it interacts with real cases. Watson even has the ability to convey doubt. When it makes diagnoses and recommends treatments, it usually issues a series of possibilities, each with its own level of confidence attached.
Medicine has never before had a tool quite like this. And at an unofficial coming-out party in Las Vegas last year, during the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, more than 1,000 professionals packed a large hotel conference hall, and an overflow room nearby, to hear a presentation by Marty Kohn, an emergency-room physician and a clinical leader of the IBM team training Watson for health care. Standing before a video screen that dwarfed his large frame, Kohn described in his husky voice how Watson could be a game changer—not just in highly specialized fields like oncology but also in primary care, given that all doctors can make mistakes that lead to costly, sometimes dangerous, treatment errors.
Drawing on his own clinical experience and on academic studies, Kohn explained that about one-third of these errors appear to be products of misdiagnosis, one cause of which is "anchoring bias": human beings" tendency to rely too heavily on a single piece of information. This happens all the time in doctors" offices, clinics, and emergency rooms. A physician hears about two or three symptoms, seizes on a diagnosis consistent with those, and subconsciously discounts evidence that points to something else. Or a physician hits upon the right diagnosis, but fails to realize that it"s incomplete, and ends up treating just one condition when the patient is, in fact, suffering from several. Tools like Watson are less prone to those failings. As such, Kohn believes, they may eventually become as ubiquitous in doctors" offices as the stethoscope.
"Watson fills in for some human limitations," Kohn told me in an interview. "Studies show that humans are good at taking a relatively limited list of possibilities and using that list, but are far less adept at using huge volumes of information. That"s where Watson shines; taking a huge list of information and winnowing it down."

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】[解析] 细节题。根据第三段第二句话“And at an unofficial coming-out party in Las Vegas last year, during the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society…”可知，Marry Kohn是在一次非正式亮相的聚会上做演讲，并非是学术会议，因此A选项错误。再根据该句中的“…Marty Kohn, an emergency-room physician and a clinical leader of the IBM team training Watson for health care.”可知，Kohn是IBM团队训练Watson从事健康护理的临床负责人，但他并不是IBM培训部的人，因此B选项错误。根据第三段中的“Standing before a video screen that dwarfed his large frame…”可知，Kohn身材较高大，只是电子屏幕让他显得矮小，因此C选项不正确。根据第三段最后一句话“Kohn described in his husky voice how Watson could be a game changer—not just in highly specialized fields like oncology but also in primary care, given that all doctors can make mistakes that lead to costly, sometimes dangerous, treatment errors.”可知，Kohn非常看好Watson的前景，因此正确答案是D选项。